About

Welcome to TUFOpix. Here you’ll find photos and posts mainly focused around cars, the people behind them and, of course, drifting… lots of drifting. There will be some random, non-automotive content here and there too. If you want to know more about the hobbit of a dude behind the lens, continue reading.

My name is Gabe and I’m a drifter. As a kid playing Gran Turismo 1 on Playstation, all I wanted to do was make my virtual car slide around all the turns. I didn’t know it was “drifting” back then, I just knew it was fun. Although, I had no idea just how much fun it actually is until my first time sliding my mom’s Toyota Cressida on the streets and eventually sliding my own S13 with Lookout Drift in 2005. Since then, I’ve slid in more drift events than I can count, won and placed high in competitions, pursued a pro-license, earned that pro-license, realized I couldn’t afford that pro-life, got payed to slide in demo’s, then realized that chill, grassroots drifting is where it’s at for me as a driver.

Sometime during all that, I bought an old point-and-shoot camera from a friend while in school in Georgia. I had no real interest in ever pursuing photography and hardly even considered it a hobby at the time. It was just a way for me to escape my school projects every now and then while exploring abandoned places and wandering the city at night. Shortly before moving to Japan in 2012, I bought a 1970’s Canon AT-1 SLR camera at an estate sale for $16. My dad just happened to have a few lenses for it and my cousin had a box of old film he was happy to let me to take off his hands. That camera was the best and only photography class I’ve had with its unforgiving lack of any automatic settings. It was glued to me once I landed in Japan, much to the dismay of my friends who had to stop for me to get a shot or change a lens every 5-seconds while we explored our new home.

After the “Exciting Car Showdown” in Nagoya 2012, where my camera developed issues, I decided to go digital and bought a DSLR. After figuring out where the ISO, shutter speed and aperture adjustments were, a single photo shoot for a friend’s fashion blog and a weekend’s worth of photos from Ebisu Circuit’s summer drift matsuri lead to me securing my first paid photo gig the day after landing in Los Angeles in the Fall of 2012. Since then, I’ve shot a number of photo gigs (no weddings), tons of drifting and car events, and began working full-time as a koi fish photographer (see: yeah, really) here in North Carolina in 2015.

Having worked as a graphic designer, stencil artist, illustrator, English teacher, precision driver, photographer and even tried out for Disney’s “Lights, Motors, Action!” show and lived in Japan and both coasts of the United States over the years, I’ve been a drifter in more ways than one for most of my life. Hopefully this blog with offer a view into how I see drifting, cars and the world in general.